by Frankie Rose
******
If it wasn’t for the pressure of Daniel’s hand around mine, I would have thought I was dreaming. Aldan was nowhere to be seen, but according to Agatha he wasn’t supposed to be with us, anyway. He was busy rifling through my mind. Instead, we were surrounded by a crowd of people, thronging and shoving at one another to get by. Daniel’s grip on my hand tightened. It was all so real; the people were all so alive. Agatha had said they were just shadows, memories, but I never remembered the people I passed in the street in this kind of detail. Maybe a flash of unusual hair color or some other distinguishing feature, but not the crow’s feet around their eyes, or the finest details of their clothing.
And thinking of clothing, I was too scared to look at myself for a moment. When I gave in and peeked down, a rush of horror stabbed through me. It was a dress all right. You could have made eighteen dresses out of all that fabric. A sea of silk exploded from my waist, a metallic purple-blue in color. It was so heavy I felt myself sinking where I stood. There was no need to check for a crinoline—no dress would be so bouffy without the assistance of a very large hoop. The corseted bodice was literally squeezing the living daylights out of me, and the lace chemisette barely covered my considerable cleavage. Where the hell had that come from? I looked preposterous. Somewhere, sometime, Aldan was laughing himself stupid.
Daniel, on the other hand, was the absolute embodiment of a Victorian gentleman. He was breathtaking in his black frock coat with turned velvet collar. Its jade lining picked out the color of his eyes, startlingly bright against the paleness of his skin. He wore a necktie and a stovepipe top hat, under which locks of his black hair escaped to curl against the nape of his neck. He clutched a brass-topped polished cane in his free hand.
A surprising realization overcame me as I stood drinking in every last detail of him—that none of this would seem strange to Daniel. Maybe it even felt normal, and perhaps traipsing around in jeans and a t-shirt was the oddity to him. I was forgetting all the time that Daniel was quite as old as he was, and that he was English, too. Or at least he had been once upon a time. You could only hear the faintest echoes of an accent in his speech, the way he enunciated a word or two in a peculiar way that was decidedly un-American. He was looking at me as though he’d seen a ghost.
“Daniel?”
He continued to stare at me with a stunned expression on his face—that was, until someone barreled into us, knocking me clean off my feet. I gritted my teeth as the coarse cobblestones bit at the fleshy heels of my palms, drawing blood. Daniel was at my side in an instant, his hand at my waist, pulling me up and through the crowd.
“You okay?”
I nodded, trying not to look quite as embarrassed as I felt. Ladies in lace caps and spoon bonnets garnished with dried flowers and small faux birds surrounded us. Men with top hats like Daniel’s and bushy moustaches ploughed through the crowd, too, all struggling towards the end of the cobbled street in front of us. Moving along with the sea of people would have been quite easy, but Daniel apparently had other ideas. He headed against the flow.
“Daniel, what is it? What’s happening?”
He cast me a sickened look over his shoulder. “A hanging. Are you okay? Can you walk?”
“I’m trying, but I keep tripping over this damn dress.”
A sour-faced lady at my side cast me a dirty look and tutted, muttering something about manners. “What was that about?” I asked, trying to hitch up an armful of my skirt so I could move.
Daniel slapped my hand down and pulled me forward. “You can’t lift your skirt up like that. And you can’t say damn, either.”
“But—”
“But nothing, that’s just how it is. Now, I’m not going to get dragged along to a hanging. If you want to go, that’s fine, but I’m going this way.” He pointed off towards a large building in the distance. I gave him an exasperated look.
“Of course I’m not going to a hanging. I’m coming with you.” Why the hell would I have wanted to go to a hanging? What sort of ghoulish pastimes did he think I would fill my days with if I could? I bit my tongue and let him drag me to the relative calm of a side street. He paused for a moment, letting me straighten out the ridiculous amounts of material that were caught and twisted around me.
“You look stupid, you know that, right?” he told me, peering out onto the street. His top hat had been knocked into a jaunty angle but on him it somehow looked like it was supposed to be that way.
“Yes, I am aware, but thanks for pointing it out.” I quashed the urge to straighten his hat. “What is that building, anyway?” I pointed far down the street, where I could make out the lacquered tops of carriages and the nodding heads of coal-black horses approaching through the crowd. Beyond them, a wide columned building rose up like an imposing monolith in the distance, blocking out a good portion of the horizon.
“It’s the British Museum,” he told me, knocking his hat back himself. “Are you ready?”
I shrugged, wiping gravel out of the scrapes on my hands. “Sure.”
Without a moment’s hesitation he pulled me into the crowd again. Thankfully the majority of the people keen to see someone swing had already rushed forward, leaving only the half-hearted followers trudging towards the square at the other end of the street. Daniel stopped short at the top of the road, pausing to allow a grand carriage to pass.
I stared at it, slack-jawed. It looked like the Mercedes Benz of horse drawn carriages. The doors were so highly polished that I could see my own surprised reflection in its gleaming black paneling, which was embellished with gold leaf fleur-de-lis. A moustachioed gentleman scowled out of the window at us and flung the curtain closed, calling to the driver to hurry on just as it started to rain.
The clouds overhead were swollen and grey, the light all flat and bleak, just as I imagined it would be in England after all you heard about the terrible weather. The smell was bad, too, like fetid garbage left out in the sun for a few days. When I looked down, I saw that that was precisely the case. The gutters were overflowing with all kinds of rubbish, and of course, horse manure. And in amongst all that filth there were scraps of children running barefoot, weaving their way through the ebbing flow of people, clutching wilting bunches of flowers in their dirty mitts. One raced up to Daniel, shoving the limp posy out towards him.
“’Ere mister, buy a flower?”
Daniel looked down at the urchin, the boy’s dirt-streaked face with sunken cheeks, and felt at his waistcoat. He withdrew a silver coin from the pocket and tossed it to the boy, who caught it expertly out of the air. He thrust a flower at Daniel, who took it and passed it back to me without a word. A dog rose, a little tatty and missing some of its outer petals, but still beautiful in its simplicity. An odd lump rose in my throat.
Daniel had given me a flower. I wasn’t foolish enough to think that he did it wittingly. He obviously felt sorry for the boy even though he wasn’t real, or at least was very dead by now, and had only paid him the coin out of pity. There’d been no emotion as he passed it back; he hadn’t even looked at me. And yet Daniel had given me a flower.
He pulled me across the street while I stared down at the pale pink, silken petals. I barely noticed when he suddenly veered me around a fresh pile of horse manure in the middle of the road. When I looked up, I found him watching me.
“What?”
The distant look that had been evident on his face, if only for a second, vanished. “Nothing. I was just thinking about when I used to live here. This was my London. I knew this place so well.”
“Where are we exactly?”
“Bloomsbury,” he said. “Very fashionable place to live back in the day. Perfectly situated between Holborn and Euston Road. See that square?” He gestured to a small, well-manicured garden that bore numerous park benches, where ladies in expensive-looking dresses and their drabber female companions sat feeding flocks of pigeons. “Francis Russell, the fifth Duke of Bedford, laid the ground for that
square. The Russells practically made this area what it is today. Well, back then. And now, I guess…” he said, confused.
I stared up at the museum, which was now looming ahead of us. Couples paraded the steps at the entrance, the men with their stiff gaits and canes, the ladies with their coiffured hair and parasols.
“Why did you want to come here?” I asked. The building was certainly impressive, but it wasn’t him. A whorehouse or a bawdy pub, maybe, but not a museum.
A long pause stretched out while Daniel searched up and down the street, his cane grasped tightly in his hand. The beginnings of a frown lined his forehead. “Because,” he murmured, “I used to come here when I was a boy. Sometimes…”
He trailed off, fixing his sights on a group of rag-tag children at the top of the steps. They were running down the steps towards us, barefoot like the other children, their clothes torn and dirty, being chased by what appeared to be a museum guard. The skinny little boy at the front of the group, maybe only six years old, squealed with delight as he ran. His fine, dark hair was plastered to his head by the rain.
“Sometimes…” whispered Daniel, sinking to his knees. His face was ashen, and he looked as though he’d just been kicked in the stomach. The boy careened passed us, whooping and laughing in a reedy, high-pitched voice. He paused to look over his shoulder and gave Daniel a curious, intrigued look. Daniel just blinked back at him.
“Sometimes…I see Jamie.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Gatti’s